Current Affairs - Business

The 2nd National Economic Growth Summit 2025 took place in Mumbai, where BEML earned significant recognition for its performance and brand leadership. During this event, BEML’s CMD, Shantanu Roy, received the Business Leader of the Year (Manufacturing) award for enhancing competitiveness, integrating advanced technologies, and driving overall growth. The organisation was also honoured with the ‘Best Brand of the Year’ award, reflecting its strong presence across rail, defence, and mining sectors. The venue played a key role as the summit brought together influential leaders, providing a platform for organisations like BEML to showcase their achievements.

HDFC Bank regained its position as India’s most valuable brand in the 2025 Kantar BrandZ rankings, achieving a brand value of $44.9 billion. This comeback reflects a combination of strong post-merger consolidation with HDFC Ltd, accelerated digital innovations, and sustained consumer trust. The bank’s initiatives—such as its rapid loan processing systems and cybersecurity-focused brand mascots—enhanced its market presence and differentiation. With a remarkable 377% rise in brand value since 2014, HDFC Bank demonstrates consistent long-term brand investment. Its renewed leadership comes at a time when most major Indian brands are experiencing slower growth, highlighting the bank’s ability to stand out in a competitive landscape.

Banas Dairy, Asia’s largest dairy cooperative and a key member of the Amul network, partnered with Bharatiya Beej Sahakari Samiti Limited (BBSSL) to enhance India’s potato value chain. Through this MoU, Banas Dairy is contributing technical expertise, tissue culture facilities, aeroponic systems, and strong market-linkage support. This collaboration aligns with the national vision of “Sahakar se Samriddhi,” which encourages cooperation among cooperatives to empower farmers. By focusing on disease-free seed potato production, scientific cultivation methods, and contract farming, the partnership aims to reduce crop losses, increase productivity, uplift rural incomes, and build a more resilient agricultural value chain.

Engineers India Limited (EIL), a Navratna PSU under the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with NMDC Energy, a UAE-based company, to jointly undertake onshore projects in Saudi Arabia. The partnership covers a wide range of sectors, including oil and gas, refineries, petrochemicals, pipelines, storage, and energy transition. The MoU was formalised at the ADIPEC 2025 event in Abu Dhabi, marking a significant collaboration in advancing cross-border energy infrastructure initiatives.

Amazon, through its cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS), has entered a $38 billion partnership with OpenAI to enhance AI infrastructure and scalability. Announced on November 3, 2025, the agreement provides OpenAI access to AWS’s extensive cloud computing resources, including millions of CPUs and hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs. This collaboration marks one of the largest AI infrastructure deployments in history and signifies a major strategic shift for OpenAI, which previously relied exclusively on Microsoft Azure. The deal strengthens Amazon’s position as a key competitor in the global AI and cloud computing market.